Japanese rice farmer Masatsugu Tanimoto doesn’t think of himself as a Christian, and you’d almost never find him in a church. But every so often, he and others meet to recite prayers drawn from another time and place.
The group, dressed in sober kimonos and sandals, rapidly make the sign of the cross as they sing a mish-mash of Portuguese, Latin and Japanese — evoking the memory of their ancestors, the so-called ‘hidden Christians’, who were brutally persecuted in the 17th century, when Shoguns ruled Japan.
Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese is bringing their harrowing story to the big screen just before Christmas in his newest movie Silence, based on the 1966 novel by famed Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo.
Photo: AFP
“If the film properly recounts the story of my ancestors, I’d gladly go see it,” Tanimoto told AFP after singing with several other descendants.
The group, from the town of Ikitsuki, near Nagasaki, meet at a local museum to conduct these rituals.
Despite their Christian roots, the multilingual prayers, known as orasho, are not meant to honor God or any Christian figure, the 60-year-old added.
Photo:AFP
“We say ‘Mary’ several times but we’re not praying to her. We don’t refer to a specific god either, but rather to our ancestors,” he added.
The link to modern day Japan, where Christians make up less than one percent of the population, stretches back more than four centuries.
The first missionary, Jesuit Francis-Xavier arrived in Japan with two companions in 1549 and was followed by Portuguese missionaries who drew tens of thousands more Japanese to the faith. The priests were expelled in the 17th century by military leaders who feared their growing influence.
Photo: AFP
For Japanese converts, hiding their religion became a matter of life and death for the next 250 years, as Christianity was banned and Japan closed itself off from the outside world.
Some suspects were forced to trample on holy images to prove they were not Christians. Many went into hiding or disguised their faith.
Those who refused to give up Christianity faced being burned to death, crucified, or slowly drowned.
ALTERED PRACTICES
Whether it was to camouflage their beliefs or adapt to an environment without priests and bibles, the hidden Christians created a blended faith that left its mark on traditions still honored by their descendants.
The Virgin Mary took the form of Kannon, the buddhist goddess of mercy. Ave Maria became the somewhat similar “Abe Maruya”.
“Isolated, they had no choice but to recreate their beliefs as faithfully as possible,” said Shigeo Nakazono, an ethnologist at the local Ikitsuki Island Museum.
Fisherman Masaichi Kawasaki’s home has four altars in his living room, including one devoted to Buddhism, another for his ancestors — common in rural Japanese homes — and a third for the Shinto faith.
The last one, stuffed with flasks, apples, flowers, a melon, a cross and candles, features a kimono-clad woman with long black hair holding a child — is unmistakeable as an image of the Virgin Mary.
On a table lay tiny white paper crosses like the ones Kawasaki’s ancestors would hide in the ears of deceased converts.
“It was only natural that I would learn this practice as it was part of my daily life growing up as a child, a bit like one assimilates a habit into everyday life,” the 66-year-old said.
DISAPPEARING TRADITIONS
Many descendants, known as Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians in Japanese), in the small community about 1,000km southwest of Tokyo have never joined the church and struggle to identify with Christianity.
Some of earlier underground Christians converted to Catholicism after priests returned in the mid-19th century, when Japan lifted over two centuries of self-imposed isolation.
In 1865, a group of nervous peasants approached a Christian missionary working in Japan. One woman whispered “ours hearts are the same as yours,” revealing the previously unknown existence of what turned out to be tens of thousands of the original Christians’ ancestors.
Some think the Catholic church should reach out to help ensure the story doesn’t fade into the mists of time.
“It is something that happened here in Japan and is a unique thing in the world,” said Father Renzo de Luca, director of Nagasaki’s Twenty-six Martyrs Museum and Monument, which commemorates Christians executed on the site in the late 1500s.
But there are just a few hundred known descendants of the hidden Christians left, and many younger people don’t show much interest in carrying on traditions to honor the long-dead converts.
“It’s really sad,” said 64-year-old carpenter Yoshitaka Oishi, his eyes welling up with tears.
“If this doesn’t get passed down, it’s finished.”
Recently the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and its Mini-Me partner in the legislature, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), have been arguing that construction of chip fabs in the US by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is little more than stripping Taiwan of its assets. For example, KMT Legislative Caucus First Deputy Secretary-General Lin Pei-hsiang (林沛祥) in January said that “This is not ‘reciprocal cooperation’ ... but a substantial hollowing out of our country.” Similarly, former TPP Chair Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) contended it constitutes “selling Taiwan out to the United States.” The two pro-China parties are proposing a bill that
March 9 to March 15 “This land produced no horses,” Qing Dynasty envoy Yu Yung-ho (郁永河) observed when he visited Taiwan in 1697. He didn’t mean that there were no horses at all; it was just difficult to transport them across the sea and raise them in the hot and humid climate. “Although 10,000 soldiers were stationed here, the camps had fewer than 1,000 horses,” Yu added. Starting from the Dutch in the 1600s, each foreign regime brought horses to Taiwan. But they remained rare animals, typically only owned by the government or
Institutions signalling a fresh beginning and new spirit often adopt new slogans, symbols and marketing materials, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is no exception. Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), soon after taking office as KMT chair, released a new slogan that plays on the party’s acronym: “Kind Mindfulness Team.” The party recently released a graphic prominently featuring the red, white and blue of the flag with a Chinese slogan “establishing peace, blessings and fortune marching forth” (締造和平,幸福前行). One part of the graphic also features two hands in blue and white grasping olive branches in a stylized shape of Taiwan. Bonus points for
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS